Farnham; Saturday, 11 September, 2021

In my original plans for the day I was aiming for a later breakfast and heading out of the hotel about 10:30, as it later turned out it was very good therefore that I woke up just a little after 8 and decided that I might as well get up and have breakfast now before it got too busy. Consequently I was out of the hotel and ready at the bus stop five minutes early for the 09:32 bus. Where I waited, and waited, and waited some more. After several months of travelling round England where the buses have almost always been on time, or if they weren’t the local bus company had a tracking app that let you see in real time how the service was performing, Farnham was a very quick drag back to Classic bus, where there’s no info. Is the bus running, has it been cancelled, did the driver decide to depart 10 minutes early. None of the local buses appear to have radios so none of the other drivers knew anything about other services.

I had just about given up and was about to start on the 2 mile walk to my first destination of the day when around the corner, nearly 25 minutes late, my bus turned into view. I hopped on to a very apologetic driver – he’d been caught up in congestion on an earlier trip and was still recovering time – and headed off to my first stop of the day.

First stop, 10 minutes ride out of Farnham, was the site of the former Cistercian Abbey of Waverley. Originally built in the 12th century and expanded over the following years the site was eventually stripped from the church during the reformation and sold off to a mate of Henry VIII and from there a slow decay into ruins started on the buildings. Today not much of the original site remains, but there are still some substantial bits of masonry standing, and a downloadable audio guide from the English Heritage site was useful in telling me more about the site, as well as directing me to the back of the site by the river where the most modern addition to the site – 80 year old anti-tank blocks show how the site has continued to be used into the modern day.

I looked at the time and realised that I needed to start making a move back to the bus stop, as it would be inevitable that as my bus had been 20 minutes late the next one would be early. A premonition that a few minutes later came true as I turned onto the main road to see the bus fast approaching, requiring a sprint to the bus stop to make sure I caught it and didn’t have a long wait. Thankfully the driver realised why I was running and pulled up letting me on. The bus then meandered off on a very pretty tour round some of the more rural parts of Surrey before reaching the town of Godalming and then heading on into Guildford.

The bus station in Guildford is located next door to the main shopping centre and I took advantage of the food court there to have a quick lunch before heading off into town to have a quick look around. My first stop was the castle park and the remains of the Norman castle. I had a wander round the grounds which are now a very pleasant park and gardens, and then climbed up to the base of the Keep. In normal times you can climb up inside the Keep to take in the views from the top, but the council closed the Keep at the start of the first lockdown in March 2020 and 18 months later it was still closed.

From the castle I wandered down the hill to the small museum that’s located in a building built on the line of the former curtain wall of the castle site. I had a quick look round the museum before wandering back into town via the Millmead lock where the River Wey and the Godalming Navigations meet. By the time I got back to the bus station I was back up to running about an hour early from where I planned to be, so I decided to catch the earlier bus.

And this is where my being early paid off. First the bus timetable, that I’d checked about a week earlier, had been changed with a new Saturday service starting today, meaning the bus that I was aiming for was actually 15 minutes later, so rather than walking briskly to the bus station I could have sauntered. On leaving Guildford the bus headed out of town and turned onto the A31 Hogs Back road. The modern dual carriageway road follows the line of the original Hogs Back Road which may be Roman in its origins. Running along a narrow spine ridge on the downs with stunning views down on either side it would make a really good place to build a road.

Along with the stunning views the other thing the Hogs Back is famous for is routinely getting featured in travel reports for delays and congestion, and with road works closing a part of it that was the case today. Rather than taking 25 minutes to zip between Guildford and Farnham we crawled for about 3 miles past the road closure and along the diversion, eventually arriving into Farnham about 40 minutes late and most of my spare hour had evaporated. But at least it meant I could still do everything I’d planned – if I’d been on the later bus in the morning I could well have ended up in an even longer traffic jam.

I’d gotten off the bus close to the Farnham Museum which I had a look around, before walking across town to the Keep of Farnham Castle. There’s been a castle on this site since the 12th Century, though the ruins there now are from a later version of the castle.

After taking in the castle I wandered the short distance back to my hotel to freshen up before heading out for dinner at a very nice Indian restaurant close by and then heading back for a well deserved early night.